Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto (review)

Yuki Miyamoto’s thought-provoking book analyzes a wide array of philosophical, religious, popular media, museum, and governmental efforts that give voice to the lives of hibakusha: survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Beyond the Mushroom Cloud compellingly mixes the analytical and the prescriptive as it proceeds from ethical interpretations of the atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki toward a demand for universal responsibility to join what Miyamoto refers to as an “inclusive community of memory.” This community enjoins everyone, not only hibakusha, to promote Hiroshima’s challenging postwar moral imperative of “not retaliation, but reconciliation.” Scholars have already addressed some of the issues Miyamoto engages, such as the nature of atomic bomb site remembrance,¹ controversy that surrounds commemoration of the war dead,² and dilemmas occasioned by relying on Japan’s religious traditions as resources for peace.³ Beyond the Mushroom Cloud casts a wider net than almost all of these studies: it draws inventively on a broad range of Japanese texts and ideas from ethicists inside and outside Japan to suggest possibilities inherent within hibakusha narratives to erase distinctions between victim and victimizer, and even between the living and the dead.

Miyamoto splits her book into three sections. “Commemoration,” the first and strongest section, opens with chapter 1, “Toward a Community of Memory,” which Miyamoto begins with a discussion of outrage triggered by the 1995 Smithsonian exhibition that displayed both the Enola Gay (the aircraft that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima) and Japanese testimonials of the atomic bombing. She turns to Avishai Margalit’s work on memory and community, acknowledging the difficult task of moving beyond “thick” relations of natural communities (one’s own family, nation, and/or ethnicity) to apply the Good Samaritan’s principle of selfless love of fellow human beings in order to foster universal ethical relations. Miyamoto asserts that the dangers of nuclear weapons pose such an overwhelming existential threat to humankind that the community-specific experiences of Japanese hibakusha translate across divides, and that the nation-state—which Margalit proposes as a natural forum—is demonstrably not the most desirable location for a community of memory. She suggests that municipally generated efforts to establish Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and Museum serve as an inspiring example of how a community of memory may transcend nation-centered politics. Self-reflection evident in the museum presentations and in advocacy by Hiroshima’s municipal politicians acknowledges ambiguous identities of hibakusha as victims and perpetrators, and their identity as survivors who are not necessarily Japanese. These efforts have enabled Hiroshima to present itself outside national frameworks as a model for transcending ideological, class, and religious differences.

“Commemoration” continues with chapter 2 in which Miyamoto lays out a persuasive critique of Sueki Fumihiko’s comparative analysis of Yasukuni Shrine to the war dead and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with her own comparison of the two sites. She deftly dismantles Sueki’s positive assessment of Yasukuni as she extends some of his ideas, notably the principle of “transethics” and the importance of fostering a dialogue with the dead in order to cultivate ethics in the living. Sueki, in his 2006 book Bukkyō vs. rinri (Buddhism versus ethics), castigates what he perceives as Buddhism’s failure to take death seriously in its progressively modernizing, rationalizing forms. By positing stark differentiation between the living and spirits of the dead, modern Buddhism limits ethical discourse to the human relations of the living, thereby blocking a Buberian I / Thou relationship with the dead that appreciates forces beyond man-made comprehension—a transcendence Sueki calls “transethics” (chōrinri). Sueki praises Yasukuni for what he sees as the transethical manner in which the shrine communes with spirits, and he criticizes the Hiroshima memorial’s nonreligious cenotaph as arrogant mistreatment of the dead that leaves them sitting in silence rather than engaging them through religious ritual.

Miyamoto strongly resists Sueki’s claims...